Sunday, May 17, 2009

Oblivious or obviated outrage...

A year ago: The Times, May 18th 2008: Tony Blair’s expenses shredded: Some of Tony Blair's expenses claims, which the High Court last week ruled should be disclosed to the public, have been shredded. The documents, itemising Blair's claims for household expenses during a year of his premiership, were destroyed in the midst of a legal battle over whether they should be published. All MPs' expenses are funded by taxpayers.

In the Daily Mail: "Tony Blair's expenses shredded 'by mistake' - just as they were about to be made public." [Link] The article goes on to say "Commons Speaker Michael Martin allowed officials to destroy claim forms and receipts up to April 2005 - meaning thousands of expenses have been secretly shredded." and "Speaker Michael Martin squandered almost £200,000 of taxpayers cash in his failed attempt to keep the accounts secret."

THIS WAS LAST YEAR! Only in the last week we were reminded: Tony Blair facing questions (Daily Telegraph) over how he funded his multi-million-pound property empire...

Also: "Tony Blair and the huge new mortgages"Mail Online: Tony Blair remortgaged his constituency home for £296000, almost ten times what he paid for it, months before he bought his London townhouse for £3.65million.

Revealed: the 'black hole' in Blair's expenses: TONY BLAIR is facing questions over an apparent "black hole" in his parliamentary expenses...

That final link WAS THREE YEARS AGO!! Why has it been allowed to go on so long, how and why have they been allowed to hide it: Parliament isn't theirs, it's ours!

P.S. Being rampantly anti-Blair (and Brown!) for well over a decade I was intrigued to know how I could have missed all this when it was in the news so I went and checked in the Owsblog archives: the answer - and I was pleasantly reminded - was that I had better things to do in nicer surroundings! May 17th 2008: Ostras: overdose of oysters...

2 comments:

I was wondering how I missed the Oysterfest but the 18th is my wedding anniversary and I think we were away.

Anyway back to the Blair 'black hole' - I know this was commented on at the time on the 5Live boards but I suppose given the fact that the whole expenses thing was very much small fry then I suppose he just faded away.

Please note: I like to keep Owsblog front page reasonably 'short'; for many more years worth of Owsblog posts please use (i) the archives drop-down box in the side bar or, or (ii) for more recent just click on the 'older posts' link under the bottom blog-post. Thanks.